Can one man really save boxing? Even after a weekend win, the future looks bloody for the greatest fighter that never was.

ARLINGTON, Texas — "I was lucky to survive," Manny Pacquiao said. And he meant it. The world's greatest pound-for-pound boxer was sitting here on Saturday night, his eyes puffy, two deep cuts on his left cheek, talking about a "very painful" shot he'd taken from Antonio Margarito, a man five inches, sixteen pounds, and three weight classes bigger than him. And it looked like it. From ringside during the sixth round at Cowboys Stadium, you could see a grimace on the face that never stops smiling, the face that is, ostensibly, the face of boxing — if that even means anything to anyone anymore.

Sure, it was Margarito who ended up mutilated — Look at his eyes! Pacquiao shouted to the referee five rounds and several hundred punches later — but in winning his eighth world title in eight weight classes, PacMan now finds himself looking for something between a legacy and a lifeline: If you're the best boxer of an era in which boxing has transformed into a minor sport, and transcending that sport means more to a country half a world away than the 41,734 people in a stadium in Texas, how much is still worth fighting for?

In one of our recent conversations, Pacquiao told me he planned to fight three more times — four, maybe. Which means he might never meet his greatest rival, the American Floyd Mayweather Jr., and never deliver his sport, however minor, its ultimate event. On Saturday, the 31-year-old sounded as reflective as he looked exhausted. "If it happens it happens," he said of a potential Mayweather fight. "If not, I'm satisfied with my career, but that fight would be great for boxing."

And what's bad for boxing is good for the UFC, which looks to a boxing purist at one of the few major fights of the year like two hicks kicking the shit out of each other in a bar-room brawl — but looks to the million American blood junkies who watch it every month like the future of sports... with two guys who speak English.

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Boxing in this country has been experiencing something of a Code Blue phase since about the time Mike spit out a chunk of ear cartilage. Network executives call it "too ethnic," most newspapers bury it, pretty much every promoter continues to ruin it. And one man can't save it alone. "Pacquiao has come at a time when American boxing is in decline and there are no other crossover American superstars," says Thomas Hauser, author of an influential biography on Muhammad Ali. "Manny hasn't achieved the crossover status of Ali, Leonard, Tyson, De La Hoya — but people would cross the street to see Manny Pacquiao."

And Manny Pacquiao would cross the globe to do something other than fight. On Saturday he changed the subject from Mayweather, insisting he had a job to do back home in his native Philippines. And he does: Six months ago, Pacquiao was elected to Congress there, and there is already talk of a run for president. Of 94 million people. Seriously.

In America, he may be the little guy that little more than a million of us would pay to see beat a Mexican to a bloody pulp on a Saturday night — the guy who was on 60 Minutes after Obama, the guy who campaigned for Harry Reid and maybe even helped him win. (Reid sent a congratulatory text right after the fight: MANNY IS THE MAN.) But in Manila, he is the thrill of a nation and "the face of an emerging Asia," says the legendary promoter Bob Arum, who traveled there five years ago to recruit Pacquiao and make him a star. A Filipino? But in a rise — and now maybe a swell — that has, strangely, synced up with Obama's, the man for whom sardines were once a luxury became in less than an election cycle the hero to a boxing subculture the world over.

It's the subculture that's the problem. "With those eight titles, I will be in the record books with him forever," Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, said before the fight. But without a Mayweather fight, without another PacMan, without much Manny left to watch, it's worth asking: who's still reading the record books?

--Gary Andrew Poole is the author of PacMan: Behind the Scenes With Manny Pacquiao, which is available now.

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